Stellar Blade
Stellar Blade’s review embargo was up yesterday, and of course controversy followed. But that was not mainly about reviews, which on average were quite positive, but about something that needed to be wiped out of the game before release.
The issue in question was some graffiti in the game that had the world “HARD” spray painted on a wall, next to a sign that said “R Shop.” Viewing it in one screenshot, it looks like the phrase “Hard R.”
That can mean one of two things in English, that a movie is rated a “hard R” for more extreme violence or sex. But more pressingly, it’s a reference to saying a racial slur in its entirety with the “r” pronounced at the end.
Sony had to comment on this, saying it was unintentional, and would be patched out. It has indeed been patched out, and the HARD is now replaced with CRIME (Crime R!). Here’s Sony:
“The placement of two graphics near each other in Stellar Blade resulted in an unintentional objectionable phrase,” said PlayStation’s statement. “Shift Up had no intention of creating offensive artwork and will be replacing the graffiti for the Day 1 patch.”
Hard R
As someone who put about 30 hours into the game, I never actually saw this as the central city of Xion is large and I didn’t inspect every wall. But I know why it happened.
Every detail of a city like this is not crafting fully by hand. Textures repeat and are spread/pasted through the landscape. In this instance, that’s graffiti. In another, there’s an example of a sign for a meat market inside a children’s toy store. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense and wasn’t cleaned up enough to be logical. Or to catch…some unfortunate phrases.
The fact is that this absolutely was not intentional, and just a really, really unfortunate piece of bad luck. This did not, however, prevent the situation from feeding into the recent discourse in the gaming industry. Some were saying an American inclusion consulting firm (like Sweet Baby Inc) might have caught something like that the Korean animators may have missed. I’m not sure about that as again, I don’t know if a handful of people exploring the game would have necessarily caught this. I’m pretty sure 99% of reviewers never did.
But the other side has now deemed this “journalists censoring Stellar Blade” since they cannot go after the low metacritic average they were expecting. Except of course this was a totally unintentional mistake, not SHIFT UP trying to be edgy in any way. It’s fixing an error, not…erasing SHIFT UP’s freedom of speech? I’m not even sure what the argument is here, but they wanted something to be mad about.
In any case, it’s gone. Players won’t see it in-game. But in a more important pre-launch patch, Stellar Blade now has New Game Plus that was added after the fact, so I’m about to head back in myself. Looking forward!
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.